Syria: Assad's last stand

A huge battle, perhaps the decisive one of the Syrian civil war, is about to erupt in Damascus. The UN announced it was withdrawing non-essential staff, and the rebels, flush with arms captured from strategic military bases, money, and surface to air missiles, are moving in. They are not strong enough to take the capital, but nor are they in any mood to withdraw. After a war this long and this bitter, there is only one direction of travel, and that is forwards.

Bashar al-Assad has ringed the city with a force 80,000-strong and is reported by his Russian interlocutors to have lost all hope of either victory or escape. His officer corps remains solid and loyal. Only 4,000 of the 27,000 officers in the loyalist force are Sunni, and of those about 1,800 have defected. About 22,000 officers are Alawite, and the number of defections from those ranks is still in single figures. The profoundly sectarian nature of Assad's last stand, and the failure of the rebels to do anything that will convince this minority that their rights, property and lives will be protected after the fall of the regime, provide just two indications of how hard fought the battle for Damascus could prove – if it is allowed to take place.

Over 20 months into this conflict, there are signs, too, that Russia is having second thoughts. Its military support of Assad was doomed to failure from the start. It was a toxic brew of three ingredients: the hangover from Russia's traditional support for Syria; the product of domestic concerns about popular revolutions, regime change and Islamic revolt in the North Caucasus; and a complete misreading of the nature of the Arab spring itself. Some otherwise distinguished foreign policy analysts in Moscow persuaded themselves that the Arab spring was not a popular revolt, but a colour revolution started by the CIA.

Reality is making an unwelcome intrusion into their calculations. Russia's position is weaker now that the rebels are stronger militarily, and that European support for the Free Syrian Army means money and arms are now flooding in. Vladimir Putin's remarks on Monday in Ankara that Russia was not enrolled as defender of the current government in Syria are the closest the Russian president has come to distancing himself from his former ally. Russian diplomats will now have to open channels to the very opposition forces inside and outside Syria that they have shunned.

Putin had one valid point to make when he used the Nato-led intervention in Libya as an object lesson in what to avoid. In Libya the rifts were tribal, and they are still years from being resolved. How much worse would this scenario be in the event of a collapse of the Syrian state, if the rifts are sectarian? Assad falling is no longer the sole issue. What will matter more is who goes with him, and who stays.

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